‘We Could Hear the Roof Ripping Off’

On Sunday evening, Brandon Hawkins was framing a storage shed in his backyard when the tornado sirens went off. He grabbed his wife, Dani, and they drove to her parents’ house, about a mile away, where there was a storm shelter.

As they pulled their truck into the garage, the approaching storm blew away the fence panels around the pool. The boat house crashed down. The couple dove inside the house with Dani’s parents, and the four huddled at the bottom of the stairs with the family’s three dogs.

“There was just a loud whistling, and all the windows started rattling, and then the freight-train noise everybody talks about,” Mr. Hawkins said. “We could hear the roof ripping off, debris flying everywhere, the dogs yelping, and Joe [Crosthwait, Dani’s father] yelling, ‘Stay down, it’s almost over.’ And then there was the calm after the storm.”